Project
Caucasus in Context
Pulitzer Center Director Jon Sawyer traveled to Russia and throughout the South Caucasus, reporting...
They call it the "Turkish tent town" because Azeri refugees who fled nearby Nagorno Karabakh during the 1992-94 war were initially housed in tents supplied by Turkish humanitarian groups. Residents here have built simple mud-brick shelters since but life remains hard: The family of Mammadov and Ashatma Bayram, pictured here, sleeps 12 in a single dirt-floored room; they cook in the open under UNHCR tarps. The Azeri government is transferring this community 20 miles south, to newly built houses far from shopping or work but within sight of the still-contested border with Nagorno Karabakh.